One benefit of keeping the cable the full length is that it can be used for longer runs in the future. Even if 210’ feet is good now, your next use might need the full 300’.
Are the signals in the ethernet cable affected by how the cable is looped? I’ve heard that video cables should not be looped since the loops can create inductance which can affect the signal quality. Is something like that a concern for ethernet cables? In my personal experience of seeing rats nests of network cables in the server room, I’m guessing it doesn’t matter too much.
Or you could just go with a new cable. $88.07 for 210 feet of shielded Cat 6. $79.54 for 210 feet of unshielded Cat 6. But a long lead time. Found another company that will sell you 210 feet of shielded Cat 6 for $87.04, and they’re claiming a 1 to 2 week turnaround time.
Never had a problem with Cat5 at gigabit speeds, though maybe it’s marginal at close to the length limit.
That said, there are limits to how inexpertly one can crimp. A friend of mine showed me how to crimp cable, but put all the pairs side by side: WO, O, WG, G, WB, B, WBr, Br. That worked poorly even at 1 megabit over a few dozen feet. But with proper pairing (WO, O, WG, B, WB, G, WBr, Br) it works fine even at gigabit speeds. Might even be ok at 2.5 Gbps over short hops.
Cat6 crimped to Cat5 standards should also be fine at 1 Gbps.
If I’m running a 300’ cable or even a 100’ cable, I want it ready for 10 years from now.
This house I ran all cat-7 or better, and unlike my last house, I did no crimping. I’m already at a Gig, and in another 6 years will probably be thankful I already support much higher.
I’ve seen crappy crimps that led to degraded throughput and screwed up at least a few myself and had to redo the crimp.
So size the cable run and use factory made and tested cat-7 or 8 is my method now.
Anyone planning for the future should be installing fiber, not copper. My home network is fiber at 10 Gbps and I’ll probably upgrade to 100 once old datacenter equipment gets cheap enough (which is where my current equipment came from).
It’s a lot cheaper than you might think, mainly because it’s totally obsolete in the datacenter and you can get used stuff for almost free on eBay. Only cost me a few hundred bucks for a router and equipment for two machines. IIRC, it was actually cheaper than copper and it’s easier to run (far thinner cables). Even 100G is getting pretty cheap.
Fiber was installed in our (very large) complex at work about 20 years ago. There were all kinds of reliability problems with it. Last year they installed copper, at great expense. So far, so good. YMMV, of course.
The space is totally different today than it was 5 years ago, let alone 20. 10G is cheap because it’s over 3 generations old. They threw out the 10 when upgrading to 40, which they threw out when they upgraded to 100, which they’re in the process of throwing out in the transition to 400.
I’m not a fan of 10G copper. They never really solved the power problems, the ports never got cheap the way 1G ports did, and it’s very sensitive to cable quality.
Yeah, I agree. 300 feet is within the max length of a 10 gb CAT 6 run, so coil it up and forget about it. Chopping 90 feet off and re-terminating it is just asking for more problems, IMO.
If you do-it-yourself, you need to buy a cable tester to make sure the job was done correctly, and that will cost you more money. Also, if you haven’t done it before, it’s very easy to screw up. Also, there is a specific order that the wires are supposed to be in when inserted into the connectors.
I honestly think you should get someone to do it. Do you have any kids or grandkids in school? If there is a technician there, and there should be these days, he’d probably do it for you for free.
You could watch a Youtube video and then buy the ends and a cheap crimper from Home Depot to do this yourself on the cheap.
The problem is you don’t have a cable tester, and most people don’t make flawless connections the first time they try this. Cheap cable testers are maybe $30?
Do you have a acquaintance/friend/extended family member who works in IT? I’d try going down that path first.
Think of it this way, it’s a cool skill to have, the equipment to do it is relatively inexpensive, YouTube University will cover the how-to, and you have about 85ft of cable to get it right.
I hate to suggest this, but there is one other solution. Chop 90’ out of the middle of the cable and then very carefully splice all eight individual wires. You can line up the wires by color so there’s no worry about mismatching the connections. Of course, you’ll need the skills of a neurosurgeon to splice wires that delicate and you’ll have a large bulge in the middle from the splices and rewrapping the cable, but you can always hide that segment behind a baseboard or something.
Slight hijack: when we upgraded our home internet last year, to a gigabit plan, the feed into the house had previously been using the coaxial feed (for cable TV) that was installed when the house was built 25 years ago. The router was attached to a coax outlet.
When we had the upgrade done, that would no longer work. We didn’t have the house rewired or anything; presumably if we’d run Cat 7 or whatever, that would have worked. They had to install the new router near an outside wall, then they put an extender in a room near the other end of the house.
Splicing the cable in the middle has a big (negative) impact on data bandwidth. Data cable is twisted properly and uniformly for a reason. I do not recommend this approach.